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About Reunion

Charles, a once-promising poet, is a professor at a minor liberal arts college, admiring of passion but without passion himself. Now living a desperately comfortable existence, he decides to return to his thirtieth college reunion. While there, he relives an intense love affair he had with a beautiful ballerina that forever changed his life. At times shocked, admiring, and furious with his younger self, Charles remembers contradictory versions of events, until reality and identity dissolve into a haze of illusion. Reunion explores the pain of self-examination, the clay-like nature of memory, and the fatal power of first love.

About Reunion

Charles, a once-promising poet, is a professor at a minor liberal arts college, admiring of passion but without passion himself. Now living a desperately comfortable existence, he decides to return to his thirtieth college reunion. While there, he relives an intense love affair he had with a beautiful ballerina that forever changed his life. At times shocked, admiring, and furious with his younger self, Charles remembers contradictory versions of events, until reality and identity dissolve into a haze of illusion. Reunion explores the pain of self-examination, the clay-like nature of memory, and the fatal power of first love.

From the Trade Paperback edition.

About Reunion

The New York Times has called Alan Lightman “highly original and imaginative.” Each of his novels is a new exploration of that imagination, utterly unlike the others. Einstein’s Dreams, an international best-seller, was a whimsical and provocative tone poem about time. The Diagnosis, hailed by the Washington Post as a “major accomplishment” and a finalist for the National Book Award, was a disturbing examination of our obsession with speed, information, and money, and the resulting poverty of our spiritual lives. Lightman’s new novel, Reunion, is a delicate and haunting story of how we shape our identity through memory.

Charles is a middle-aged professor at a minor liberal-arts college, a once promising poet, admiring of passion but without passion himself. Without knowing why, he decides to attend his thirtieth college reunion. And there, he magically witnesses a replay of his senior year.

Drawn back into his memories, Charles watches his tender and romantic twenty-two-year-old self embark on an all-consuming love affair with a beautiful dancer. As the two young people struggle to find themselves amidst the social and political chaos of the late 1960s, the older Charles recalls contradictory versions of his past, ultimately confronting for the second time a series of devastating events that would forever change his life.Written with crystalline prose, at once precise and mysterious, Reunion explores the pain of self-examination, the clay-like nature of memory, and the impossible hopefulness of youth.

From the Hardcover edition.

Praise

“Elegant . . . spare, economical and charged with meaning .” –The New York Times Book Review

"One of a handful of writers in America capable of injecting the necessary quietude into his prose. . . . Reunion is that rare thing in this age: a genuine work of art." –Denver Post

"Lightman’s prose leaps and twirls, circles his subjects and raises them up. If Degas or Manet had written prose it would read like this. . . . Reunion is that rare thing in this age: a genuine work of art." –Denver Post

“A skillful exercise in the evocation of memory and loss. . . . Lightman’s delicate prose turns [Reunion] into a fascinating study.” –The Washington Post Book World“Reunion seeks . . . to plumb life’s most complicated and enduring relationship: that between who one was and who one is. . . . Reunion most powerfully explores the seductions and betrayals of young love.” –The New York Times

“Haunting. . . . He has a Proustian concern for manipulations of time and memory . . . [a] melancholy grasp of the sovereign ineluctability of time, that ‘hour of eternity.’ . . . Such a rueful consciousness is a pleasure to witness.” –Boston Globe

"A profoundly human story, rich in depth and nuance. . . . Lightman writes with a lightness, a lyrical understatedness that belies the underlying depths and complexities of the novel. . . . Reunion is the work of a great writer." –The Globe and Mail (Toronto)

“Prose both luminous and precise. . . . The images of lightness and beauty and grace, of complexity and obsession that Lightman conjures through Charles’ vision of his lover make us participate in Charles’ yearning.” –The San Diego Union Tribune

"A subtle and haunting novel. . . . In Lightman’s hands, the act of remembrance becomes a meditation on time, loss, and the ultimate selfishness of love. His writing gets under your skin precisely because of its measured and undemonstrative tone." –Daily Mail (London)

About Alan Lightman

Alan Lightman is the author of six novels, including the international best seller Einstein’s Dreams and The Diagnosis, which was a National Book Award finalist. He is also the author of two collections of essays and several books on science…. More about Alan Lightman

About Alan Lightman

Alan Lightman is the author of six novels, including the international best seller Einstein’s Dreams and The Diagnosis, which was a National Book Award finalist. He is also the author of two collections of essays and several books on science…. More about Alan Lightman

About Alan Lightman

Alan Lightman is the author of six novels, including the international best seller Einstein’s Dreams and The Diagnosis, which was a National Book Award finalist. He is also the author of two collections of essays and several books on science…. More about Alan Lightman

Author Q&A

A conversation with Alan Lightman

Q: In your new novel, Reunion, your central character Charles journeys from the present to the past to revisit himself as a young college student. Can you tell us something about Charles and how his journey begins?

A: At the opening of the novel, Charles is in his early fifties, a literature professor at a small, second-rate college somewhere in the Northeast. As a young man, he had been a promising poet, but he has not lived up to that promise. He now lives in a big, rambling house, left to him by his successful wife, whom he divorced ten years ago. Since then, Charles has had a string of empty relationships. For reasons that he doesn’t understand, he has decided to attend his thirtieth year college reunion. And there, at the reunion, he becomes a witness to his senior year in college, a year in which he was involved in a passionate but ultimately devastating love affair with a ballet dancer named Juliana. I won’t reveal how this witnessing the past comes about, but once it begins, Charles is drawn to the spectacle like a moth to a flame, wishing that he could tear himself away but finding that he is unable to do so.

Q: An idealist and romantic in his 20s, Charles has developed into a dispassionate skeptic. What do you think he expected of himself?

A: I believe that Charles, as a twenty-two-year old young man, expected what many of us expect in our youth. He saw the future stretching in front of him to infinity, shimmering with unlimited opportunities and hopes. He saw himself as immortal. More than that, he was a talented poet, all of his teachers told him so, he seethed with his talent, and he had aspirations of being a great writer. And he hoped to be a man loved by women.

Q: Your title, Reunion, represents several different kinds of reunions: the thirtieth-year college reunion that Charles attends, a reunion between Charles and Juliana, and a reunion between Charles and his younger self at age twenty two. Can you discuss this idea?

A: Of course, I like the triple meaning of reunion here, but for me the most important reunion is between the fifty-two-year-old Charles and his twenty-two-year-old self. Aging is one of the most powerful, beautiful, and horrifying experiences of life. In what ways are we the same person, and yet a different person, as ourselves ten years ago, twenty years ago, thirty years ago? I have often wondered what it would be like to meet myself of twenty or thirty years ago. What would I say to myself? What would I want to know about my younger self that I have now forgotten, or misremembered, or distorted in the vast hallways of time? What joys, what regrets would I want to express to my younger self?

Q: Tell us a little about Juliana.

A: Juliana is a private person who tells us little about her past. Evidently, she had an abusive father who abandoned the family and an alcoholic mother. At age 12 she ran away from home to live in New York City with her aunt, a former ballet dancer. Juliana becomes a dancer herself. Dancing is her life. Her ambition is to dance with Balanchine, to be as good as Suzanne Farrell. Like many dancers, she is obsessively compulsive about her body and her weight. She lives in a world of certainty, ballet, ballet, ballet. Yet, she still needs intimate relationships with men, as if the rigid formality of ballet doesn’t allow enough freedom to her body. She makes love to Charles in the tiny ballerinas’ dressing room, late at night.

Q: There is a lot about ballet in the novel. How did you research this?

A: I have always been fascinated by ballet, as an art form centered on the body. A friend of mine, a former dancer himself and now teacher of dance, shepherded me around New York to visit a number of the ballet studios still in existence from the1960s, when most of the novel takes place. I attended some classes and rehearsals. My friend also got me into a remarkable class of the Royal Ballet, from London, when they were performing in Boston. Beyond these wonderful experiences, I read some of the autobiographies of famous ballerinas and watched some documentaries about ballet.

Q: Much of Reunion takes place during the social and political chaos of the late 1960s. How did these events impact your characters?

A: The young Charles is undergoing a soul-searching period of his life brought on by the usual confusions of a twenty-two-year old and the overpowering love affair with Juliana. The chaos of the Vietnam War and all of the questions of the 1960s only add to his confusion. At times, he thinks about his future as a great poet. At other times, he thinks that he will be drafted and killed in Vietnam, like some of his classmates, and that the future extends only for the next day, that the only important moment is the present. As for so many young men of this era, Charles has ambivalent feelings about the War and many of the social issues of the day. On the one hand, he believes that the War is wrong, that various social inequalities are wrong. On the other hand, he is not sure that he should jeopardize his future by being an activist, burning his draft card, setting fire to buildings, joining the Black Panthers, and so on. Juliana, on the other hand, seems to float above the social and political issues of the day. She lives in a world of certainy. Ballet is her rock, her beauty, her purity, and her torment.

Q: Haunted by the turns his life has taken, stunned as he witnesses a replay of his senior year in college, the older Charles remembers various conflicting versions of his love affair with Juliana and is shocked to realize that his own recollections may be more self-serving than accurate after all these years. Is this revelation a commentary on how we view ourselves versus how the world views us?

A: Memory is a clay-like substance. I believe that we distort, bend, and reshape personal memory to fit our self image, to manufacture our self identity. The most mysterious aspect of existence, in my opinion, is consciousness, self awareness. And that consciousness and "I-ness" is, in turn, determined in part by memory, memory of events in the past, relationships in the past, actions and decisions in the past, who we were in the past. Because memory is malleable, all of those past decisions, actions, and impulses of the heart are also malleable, they twist and shimmer in a half light, subject to interpretation and reconstruction, so that it is impossible to say what really happened. Reality itself disappears in a haze of uncertainty and human frailty.

Q: Your previous fiction clearly melds your scientific background into your fiction. Reunion is a much more romantic book, and the relationship between Charles and Juliana is one of great passion. Would you describe yourself as a romantic?

A: Yes, I would describe myself as a romantic. From a young age, I have struggled with a kind of split personality: on one side intuitive, artistic, romantic; on the other side rational, scientific, dispassionate. In high school, I wrote poetry and I also built rockets. I constantly feel these two sides warring with each other, in my professional work, in my friendships, in love relationships. Even in my fiction, I find this tension. I think that Reunion comes far closer to my romantic and passionate side than any of my previous books.

From the Hardcover edition.

A conversation with Alan Lightman

Q: In your new novel, Reunion, your central character Charles journeys from the present to the past to revisit himself as a young college student. Can you tell us something about Charles and how his journey begins?

A: At the opening of the novel, Charles is in his early fifties, a literature professor at a small, second-rate college somewhere in the Northeast. As a young man, he had been a promising poet, but he has not lived up to that promise. He now lives in a big, rambling house, left to him by his successful wife, whom he divorced ten years ago. Since then, Charles has had a string of empty relationships. For reasons that he doesn’t understand, he has decided to attend his thirtieth year college reunion. And there, at the reunion, he becomes a witness to his senior year in college, a year in which he was involved in a passionate but ultimately devastating love affair with a ballet dancer named Juliana. I won’t reveal how this witnessing the past comes about, but once it begins, Charles is drawn to the spectacle like a moth to a flame, wishing that he could tear himself away but finding that he is unable to do so.

Q: An idealist and romantic in his 20s, Charles has developed into a dispassionate skeptic. What do you think he expected of himself?

A: I believe that Charles, as a twenty-two-year old young man, expected what many of us expect in our youth. He saw the future stretching in front of him to infinity, shimmering with unlimited opportunities and hopes. He saw himself as immortal. More than that, he was a talented poet, all of his teachers told him so, he seethed with his talent, and he had aspirations of being a great writer. And he hoped to be a man loved by women.

Q: Your title, Reunion, represents several different kinds of reunions: the thirtieth-year college reunion that Charles attends, a reunion between Charles and Juliana, and a reunion between Charles and his younger self at age twenty two. Can you discuss this idea?

A: Of course, I like the triple meaning of reunion here, but for me the most important reunion is between the fifty-two-year-old Charles and his twenty-two-year-old self. Aging is one of the most powerful, beautiful, and horrifying experiences of life. In what ways are we the same person, and yet a different person, as ourselves ten years ago, twenty years ago, thirty years ago? I have often wondered what it would be like to meet myself of twenty or thirty years ago. What would I say to myself? What would I want to know about my younger self that I have now forgotten, or misremembered, or distorted in the vast hallways of time? What joys, what regrets would I want to express to my younger self?

Q: Tell us a little about Juliana.

A: Juliana is a private person who tells us little about her past. Evidently, she had an abusive father who abandoned the family and an alcoholic mother. At age 12 she ran away from home to live in New York City with her aunt, a former ballet dancer. Juliana becomes a dancer herself. Dancing is her life. Her ambition is to dance with Balanchine, to be as good as Suzanne Farrell. Like many dancers, she is obsessively compulsive about her body and her weight. She lives in a world of certainty, ballet, ballet, ballet. Yet, she still needs intimate relationships with men, as if the rigid formality of ballet doesn’t allow enough freedom to her body. She makes love to Charles in the tiny ballerinas’ dressing room, late at night.

Q: There is a lot about ballet in the novel. How did you research this?

A: I have always been fascinated by ballet, as an art form centered on the body. A friend of mine, a former dancer himself and now teacher of dance, shepherded me around New York to visit a number of the ballet studios still in existence from the1960s, when most of the novel takes place. I attended some classes and rehearsals. My friend also got me into a remarkable class of the Royal Ballet, from London, when they were performing in Boston. Beyond these wonderful experiences, I read some of the autobiographies of famous ballerinas and watched some documentaries about ballet.

Q: Much of Reunion takes place during the social and political chaos of the late 1960s. How did these events impact your characters?

A: The young Charles is undergoing a soul-searching period of his life brought on by the usual confusions of a twenty-two-year old and the overpowering love affair with Juliana. The chaos of the Vietnam War and all of the questions of the 1960s only add to his confusion. At times, he thinks about his future as a great poet. At other times, he thinks that he will be drafted and killed in Vietnam, like some of his classmates, and that the future extends only for the next day, that the only important moment is the present. As for so many young men of this era, Charles has ambivalent feelings about the War and many of the social issues of the day. On the one hand, he believes that the War is wrong, that various social inequalities are wrong. On the other hand, he is not sure that he should jeopardize his future by being an activist, burning his draft card, setting fire to buildings, joining the Black Panthers, and so on. Juliana, on the other hand, seems to float above the social and political issues of the day. She lives in a world of certainy. Ballet is her rock, her beauty, her purity, and her torment.

Q: Haunted by the turns his life has taken, stunned as he witnesses a replay of his senior year in college, the older Charles remembers various conflicting versions of his love affair with Juliana and is shocked to realize that his own recollections may be more self-serving than accurate after all these years. Is this revelation a commentary on how we view ourselves versus how the world views us?

A: Memory is a clay-like substance. I believe that we distort, bend, and reshape personal memory to fit our self image, to manufacture our self identity. The most mysterious aspect of existence, in my opinion, is consciousness, self awareness. And that consciousness and “I-ness” is, in turn, determined in part by memory, memory of events in the past, relationships in the past, actions and decisions in the past, who we were in the past. Because memory is malleable, all of those past decisions, actions, and impulses of the heart are also malleable, they twist and shimmer in a half light, subject to interpretation and reconstruction, so that it is impossible to say what really happened. Reality itself disappears in a haze of uncertainty and human frailty.

Q: Your previous fiction clearly melds your scientific background into your fiction. Reunion is a much more romantic book, and the relationship between Charles and Juliana is one of great passion. Would you describe yourself as a romantic?

A: Yes, I would describe myself as a romantic. From a young age, I have struggled with a kind of split personality: on one side intuitive, artistic, romantic; on the other side rational, scientific, dispassionate. In high school, I wrote poetry and I also built rockets. I constantly feel these two sides warring with each other, in my professional work, in my friendships, in love relationships. Even in my fiction, I find this tension. I think that Reunion comes far closer to my romantic and passionate side than any of my previous books.

A conversation with Alan Lightman

Q: In your new novel, Reunion, your central character Charles journeys from the present to the past to revisit himself as a young college student. Can you tell us something about Charles and how his journey begins?

A: At the opening of the novel, Charles is in his early fifties, a literature professor at a small, second-rate college somewhere in the Northeast. As a young man, he had been a promising poet, but he has not lived up to that promise. He now lives in a big, rambling house, left to him by his successful wife, whom he divorced ten years ago. Since then, Charles has had a string of empty relationships. For reasons that he doesn’t understand, he has decided to attend his thirtieth year college reunion. And there, at the reunion, he becomes a witness to his senior year in college, a year in which he was involved in a passionate but ultimately devastating love affair with a ballet dancer named Juliana. I won’t reveal how this witnessing the past comes about, but once it begins, Charles is drawn to the spectacle like a moth to a flame, wishing that he could tear himself away but finding that he is unable to do so.

Q: An idealist and romantic in his 20s, Charles has developed into a dispassionate skeptic. What do you think he expected of himself?

A: I believe that Charles, as a twenty-two-year old young man, expected what many of us expect in our youth. He saw the future stretching in front of him to infinity, shimmering with unlimited opportunities and hopes. He saw himself as immortal. More than that, he was a talented poet, all of his teachers told him so, he seethed with his talent, and he had aspirations of being a great writer. And he hoped to be a man loved by women.

Q: Your title, Reunion, represents several different kinds of reunions: the thirtieth-year college reunion that Charles attends, a reunion between Charles and Juliana, and a reunion between Charles and his younger self at age twenty two. Can you discuss this idea?

A: Of course, I like the triple meaning of reunion here, but for me the most important reunion is between the fifty-two-year-old Charles and his twenty-two-year-old self. Aging is one of the most powerful, beautiful, and horrifying experiences of life. In what ways are we the same person, and yet a different person, as ourselves ten years ago, twenty years ago, thirty years ago? I have often wondered what it would be like to meet myself of twenty or thirty years ago. What would I say to myself? What would I want to know about my younger self that I have now forgotten, or misremembered, or distorted in the vast hallways of time? What joys, what regrets would I want to express to my younger self?

Q: Tell us a little about Juliana.

A: Juliana is a private person who tells us little about her past. Evidently, she had an abusive father who abandoned the family and an alcoholic mother. At age 12 she ran away from home to live in New York City with her aunt, a former ballet dancer. Juliana becomes a dancer herself. Dancing is her life. Her ambition is to dance with Balanchine, to be as good as Suzanne Farrell. Like many dancers, she is obsessively compulsive about her body and her weight. She lives in a world of certainty, ballet, ballet, ballet. Yet, she still needs intimate relationships with men, as if the rigid formality of ballet doesn’t allow enough freedom to her body. She makes love to Charles in the tiny ballerinas’ dressing room, late at night.

Q: There is a lot about ballet in the novel. How did you research this?

A: I have always been fascinated by ballet, as an art form centered on the body. A friend of mine, a former dancer himself and now teacher of dance, shepherded me around New York to visit a number of the ballet studios still in existence from the1960s, when most of the novel takes place. I attended some classes and rehearsals. My friend also got me into a remarkable class of the Royal Ballet, from London, when they were performing in Boston. Beyond these wonderful experiences, I read some of the autobiographies of famous ballerinas and watched some documentaries about ballet.

Q: Much of Reunion takes place during the social and political chaos of the late 1960s. How did these events impact your characters?

A: The young Charles is undergoing a soul-searching period of his life brought on by the usual confusions of a twenty-two-year old and the overpowering love affair with Juliana. The chaos of the Vietnam War and all of the questions of the 1960s only add to his confusion. At times, he thinks about his future as a great poet. At other times, he thinks that he will be drafted and killed in Vietnam, like some of his classmates, and that the future extends only for the next day, that the only important moment is the present. As for so many young men of this era, Charles has ambivalent feelings about the War and many of the social issues of the day. On the one hand, he believes that the War is wrong, that various social inequalities are wrong. On the other hand, he is not sure that he should jeopardize his future by being an activist, burning his draft card, setting fire to buildings, joining the Black Panthers, and so on. Juliana, on the other hand, seems to float above the social and political issues of the day. She lives in a world of certainy. Ballet is her rock, her beauty, her purity, and her torment.

Q: Haunted by the turns his life has taken, stunned as he witnesses a replay of his senior year in college, the older Charles remembers various conflicting versions of his love affair with Juliana and is shocked to realize that his own recollections may be more self-serving than accurate after all these years. Is this revelation a commentary on how we view ourselves versus how the world views us?

A: Memory is a clay-like substance. I believe that we distort, bend, and reshape personal memory to fit our self image, to manufacture our self identity. The most mysterious aspect of existence, in my opinion, is consciousness, self awareness. And that consciousness and "I-ness" is, in turn, determined in part by memory, memory of events in the past, relationships in the past, actions and decisions in the past, who we were in the past. Because memory is malleable, all of those past decisions, actions, and impulses of the heart are also malleable, they twist and shimmer in a half light, subject to interpretation and reconstruction, so that it is impossible to say what really happened. Reality itself disappears in a haze of uncertainty and human frailty.

Q: Your previous fiction clearly melds your scientific background into your fiction. Reunion is a much more romantic book, and the relationship between Charles and Juliana is one of great passion. Would you describe yourself as a romantic?

A: Yes, I would describe myself as a romantic. From a young age, I have struggled with a kind of split personality: on one side intuitive, artistic, romantic; on the other side rational, scientific, dispassionate. In high school, I wrote poetry and I also built rockets. I constantly feel these two sides warring with each other, in my professional work, in my friendships, in love relationships. Even in my fiction, I find this tension. I think that Reunion comes far closer to my romantic and passionate side than any of my previous books.